Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [84]
ASIDE FROM THE SCENE, THE items found with the body couldn’t tell us much scientifically. Most of their value for us lay in our ability to connect them to the Anthony home and Casey. Investigators had obtained a warrant to search the Anthony house on December 11, the day Caylee was found, and returned again nine days later on December 20. The list of items they were searching for included shoes belonging to Casey Anthony; the original clothing Caylee had been wearing when George last saw her—a pink top, blue jean skirt, white shoes, backpack with a monkey design, and white-rimmed sunglasses; doll clothing that would fit the doll recovered from the Pontiac Sunfire; small plastic toy horses similar to one that had been found at the crime scene; and any prescription drugs, including amphetamines and narcotics.
Every scrap of plastic bag collected at the scene—and there turned out to be over three hundred of them—was tested for prints with no result. The duct tape and laundry bag tested similarly. No surprise there, given the abundance of water and heat, but they were checked anyway. Still, there was a consensus among all of us that the duct tape held a great deal of forensic potential.
When the duct tape arrived at the FBI laboratory, a decision had to be made about where to send it first. The condition of the tape was so poor that most of the adhesive was gone and much of the fabric layer had separated from the plastic. The general opinion was that there was virtually no chance of any DNA being found on the tape. As destructive as heat and moisture are to fingerprints, they are twice as destructive to DNA. The decision was made that the tape would go first to the latent print section to be photographed, then to the Trace Evidence Unit for removal of any adhering hairs or fibers, and finally to the Chemistry Unit for comparison of this sample of tape to that on the gas can.
The task of initially examining and photographing the tape fell to Elizabeth Fontaine, a fairly new examiner. One of the processes used in searching for fingerprints is to inspect the object using different wavelengths of light, some of which are beyond the human visual spectrum. During these examinations she observed no fingerprints, but she did notice a peculiar artifact on the tape, residue that appeared to be in the shape of a small heart. She would describe it as similar in appearance to what you would see after removing a Band-Aid that had been on your skin for a period of time: as if dirt had adhered to the residue of adhesive. She dutifully noted it in her report and showed it to her supervisor. Since there was no policy in place about photographing nonprint impressions, she did not photograph it, and instead she passed the tape along to trace. When trace returned it, she proceeded to the next stages of processing, using various chemicals to enhance otherwise invisible prints. The additional methods met with negative results as expected.
When news of the heart-shaped impression reached investigators, they asked Fontaine to try and photograph the impression. Unfortunately, by the time the attempts were made, the impression could no longer be detected. In an attempt to record the impression, the tape was diverted to Lori Gotesman, a documents examiner, to see if she could do anything with it. She was also unable to visualize the impression.
A big part of the investigators’ interest in the heart-shaped residue was that a red heart sticker had been found at the crime scene on a piece of